The Snoo With All the Balloons

Most teenagers probably wouldn’t opt to spend their 16th birthday in a downtown San Francisco office building—but for Ellie, getting the chance to tour the workplace of one of her favorite websites (guess which one!) was actually a dream come true. Or at least better than bowling.

Ellie, now 18, is the artist behind some of Reddit’s most recognizable illustrations. When you visit the Aww community, her cutesy, cardboard box-dwelling kitty covered in packing peanuts greets you in the header image. When our servers are busy, her sketch of alien mascot Snoo is there to entertain you before you “try again.” Her charming, hand-scrawled doodles have popped up in a slew of threads across the site.

You might know Ellie better by her endearing, if head-scratching, username: TheNYEHHH. One popular misconception is that it’s a reference to this viral video of Lord Voldemort bellowing on repeat.

The real origin of TheNYEHHH is another viral video, of Yodo the baby sloth making, well, sloth-y noises. (You’re welcome.)

Some people think it’s from Spongebob. Some people have asked me if it’s from ‘Harry Potter’ because Voldemort makes a sound like that. It’s supposed to be the sound that baby sloths make.

Reddit user TheNYEHHH on her username

When Ellie first joined Reddit in 2012, she had no intention of sharing her illustrations.

“That wasn’t the point of my account,” she explains. “For the most part, I just started commenting in AskReddit.”

“All I did was spend all of my day on Reddit because I’m a social recluse,” she jokes.

A Cordial Invitation

As Ellie approached her 16th birthday, her parents wanted to give her a unique present that would also serve to get her out of the house—a family tradition that began with her older siblings. “My parents did this thing … when you turn 16, they would take you on this little trip [to] something that you really liked,” she explains. “I really liked [Reddit], and they were like, ‘Oh, we could try to do something with that.’”

In a refreshing departure from the egregiously gaudy MTV version of a Super Sweet 16, Ellie’s parents reached out to the admins to arrange a birthday visit to Reddit HQ. In response, the admins sent a cordial invitation tailored to Ellie’s artistic talents.

Ellie wasn’t sure if she could give out Reddit’s address—so, naturally, she covered it up with a sloth. (TheNYEHHH)

“They sent a Reddit logo with a blank Snoo and said, ‘She can draw whatever she wants and we’ll put it up [on the site] for the day.”

Tour with Aliens

Ellie was “beyond psyched” at the opportunity. She sketched Snoo after Snoo, before settling on an astro-Snoo with an intergalactic cat companion and the famous “Snoo with all the balloons,” a simple line drawing of an infant-like Snoo held aloft by a bouquet of balloons tied around its belly.

When the big day arrived, Ellie, her brother Luke, and her parents hauled themselves from Grand Rapids, Michigan to Reddit HQ in San Francisco. Her Snoos went live on the site—space Snoo as the header, balloon Snoo as the footer—and a group of admins gave the 16-year-old a tour of the office.

Screenshot of Reddit’s homepage on Ellie’s birthday (TheNYEHHH)

Ellie remembers playing “a copious amount of board games,” trying her best not to take too many pictures, and spotting a small tent in the corner that was rumored to be the temporary office of a busy programmer fixing a bug on the site. (We asked around: The makeshift tent belonged to Jason Harvey, user alienth, a systems admin with a well-known aversion to light.)

“He was coding or something,” she says. “He never came out of the tent. [The other admins] made jokes about him.”

Suspended in Space

After her sweet sixteen came to a close, Ellie and her family returned home, but one of her drawings—the Snoo with the balloons—remained on Reddit. Although it was intended to be a temporary birthday gift from the admins, they liked it so much that they made the aerostat-riding alien a permanent resident of the site.

Ellie stayed in touch with Reddit HQ, offering her artistic services for projects like an illustrated guide to Global Reddit Meetup Day, front-page Snoos for Mother’s Day and Towel Day, graphics for Manual Reddit, the top hat-wearing “Buy Gold” Snoo, and the current “servers are busy” page, which features a distressed Snoo staring at its computer while a playful feline paws at the unplugged computer cord below.

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“Some people hate it because they got so annoyed with [seeing] it,” she says.

TheNYEHHH

Like Ellie’s username, the Snoo with the balloons continues to inspire theories from redditors. The drawing has become such a fixture of the community that it even warranted a post on the Out Of The Loop community—the ultimate mark of internet fame—in which user ididntgetthegold speculated that it was from “a couple who paid a sizable amount to have it on Reddit in celebration of a newborn.”

But user Suavedra probably put it best: “I always thought it symbolized the way good posts rise to the top.”

A version of this article first appeared on Reddit’s Upvoted community on August 21.